5 Command Line Ways to Find Out Linux System is 32-bit or 64-bit

This tutorial describes how to find out whether your Linux system’s OS is 32-bit or 64-bit. This will be helpful if you wanted to download or install an application in your Linux system. As we all know, we can’t install 64-bit applications into a 32-bit OS type. That’s why knowing your Linux system’s OS type is important.

Check Linux System is 32-bit or 64-bit

Here are the five easy and simple methods to verify your Linux system’s OS type. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using a GUI or CLI type systems, the following commands will work on almost all Linux operating systems such as RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Scientific Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, openSUSE etc.

1. uname Command

uname -a command will display your Linux system’s OS type. This is the universal command and it will work on almost all Linux/Unix operating systems.

Conclusion

You now know the ways to find out your Linux operating system’s type. Of course, there are few other ways to find out the OS type, but these are the often and pragmatic methods so far. If you know any other commands or methods to display the OS type, feel free to let us know in the comments section below.

These methods are fine but they cannot conclusively lead you to show whether your CPU can do 64 bit computing. You have to ascertain whether you have a processor that can do 64 bit before you want to do the actual installation of the GNU/Linux port. You need to do the correct installation of the OS port to match your CPU. For that the best tool would be to boot the server/system using a Live GNU/Linux distribution, drop down to the command line and do a ‘cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags’ at the root prompt. If you see the ‘lm’ flag then your CPU supports 64 bit computing. If so, you can proceed to install the x86_64/amd64 port of the GNU/Linux distribution.